"...difficile est saturam non scribere. Nam quis iniquae
tam patiens urbis, tam ferreus, ut teneat se..."
"...it is hard not to write Satire. For who is so tolerant of the unjust City, so steeled, that he can restrain himself... Juvenal, The Satires (1.30-32)
akakyakakyevich@gmail.com

Sunday, January 19, 2014

The Canard Conspiracy, only vaguely by Robert Ludlum...or someone like him, only still living.

Now that all the screaming over the Duck Dynasty kerfuffle has
finally died down, I am going to put my two cents in. I know that I am a little
late to the game here, but then again I usually am: I expect to be annoying
people ten years from now about what a hoot Jerry Seinfeld’s show about nothing
is, and I fully expect that people will be rolling their eyes about how funny
that whole master of your own domain thing is. I guess I should have watched
the show the first time around; it would have done wonders for my social life
then, but at the time I was catching up on the reruns of All in the Family.

But what I find really interesting about l’affaire canard (yes, I am practicing my French here—sorry about
that) is how a fairly standard exercise in American political kabuki theatre went off
the tracks this badly.At this point, I think, we
all know how this sort of thing is supposed to play out: someone on the
political right says something that someone on the political left, or one of
their pet groups, finds offensive and starts hollering about it anywhere they
can get an audience to listen. Whether or not they are really offended is
beside the point here, as is whether the offending speech was actually
offensive; being a niggard still has nothing to do with black people, no matter
what the word sounds like.Since freedom
from offense is one of our constitutional rights (really, it is. I am sure it’s
in the Constitution somewhere. Just look under the penumbras or behind the
emanations, and while you’re there, could you take a peek and see if I left my mother’s
recipe for soda bread in there as well?Thanks a lot.) the minions of the offended group will let their media mouthpieces know that they are highly offended and deeply mortified and that they
will demand that their offender make a full and contrite apology for his
heinous crime, promise to never do it again, and slink out of the American
public square, never to be heard from again, while the left and their minions
gloat and cheer and pat themselves on the back for protecting the American
public from the hurtful blatherings of yet another right wing troglodyte.

So why didn’t this scenario, a scenario we’ve all seen play out more
times than we care to remember, happen this time?My crack investigative staff has uncovered a memo
from the A & E Network that might shed some light on the matter; I am
publishing it here for the first time anywhere.

To: All Executive Staff

From: Executive Vice
President for Programming

Re: Our Duck Problem

First, I want to thank
everyone at the network for the way they have handled the Robertson controversy.It has been a tough month for everyone
involved and I know that you have done your best to protect the best interests
of the network, our shareholders, and our corporate parents. Having said that,
if our object in this whole matter was to make ourselves look like a gang of
witless morons, then we have succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. We have
managed to unite gay rights activists and evangelical Christians in mutual
loathing of the A & E Network, and while I think that uniting two such
utterly disparate groups in a mutual anything is no small achievement, I would
have preferred that some other network accomplish this great feat instead of
us.The question for us now is this:
what have we learned in all of this and how do we keep it from happening in the
future?

Here are a few points I
will want to discuss at our next meeting.

We keep all media away from Phil Robertson at
all times, without exception.Really, people, did no one on site in Louisiana notice that GQ was
interviewing Phil Robertson? Didn’t anyone down there ask themselves why
GQ would be interested in the views of a man who sports a foot-long beard
and dresses in camouflage 24/7? Did our Louisiana people think that GQ wanted
Phil’s opinions on the new spring fashions? The writer wanted him to say something
the GQ home office would find absolutely outrageous, and hellfire and
damnation for practicing homosexuals and wondering why a man would prefer
another man’s anus to a woman’s vagina definitely fits GQ’s definition of
outrageous. That the former has been Christian dogma for the past two
millennia and the latter something all straight men not serving time have
wondered about at one time or another is beside the point; both opinions come under the heading of things we do not discuss publicly. From here on
out, no media goes near Phil without my personal okay on it.

Second, regarding the possible boycotting of
Duck Dynasty / Duck Commander products by GLAAD.Please, who’s kidding who here? I will
go out on a limb and guess that the number of gay rights activists who are
also duck-hunting, card-carrying members of the NRA is probably miniscule
almost to the point of nonexistence. In short, this is not something we
have to spend a lot of time worrying about. On the other hand, the number of
duck-hunting, card-carrying members of the NRA who do watch the show and
buy Duck Dynasty / Duck Commander products comprise a good-sized chunk of
the show’s audience. Second, most of that market share agrees with Phil
and will boycott the show if we don’t put Phil back on the air.So what does this mean for us?I don’t think I have to remind everyone
who works here that A & E is a capitalist enterprise: we exist to make
money, the more money the better and truly obscene chunks of pelf are best
of all. Catering to the politically correct is all very well and good if
it keeps them off our backs, but we are not gutting the golden goose in
order to satisfy anyone’s sense of moral outrage.Not going to happen, people, remember
that. I realize that retracting Phil’s suspension from the show will make
the network look like we have no moral backbone at all, so let me repeat my
previous point: the shareholders do not care if we have moral backbones,
unicorn horns, or prehensile penises. They want their dividend checks on
time and making sure they get them is what we are here for.Keeping the gay rights people happy is
nice, but it is not the point of our particular exercise.

I bought the program, so this one is totally
on me, but I think there’s something for all of us to learn here. I bought the program thinking that we
were getting an updated version of The
Beverly Hillbillies and that the audience would get a good laugh at
their antics down there on the bayou. Well, the laugh’s on me here. People
are not laughing at the Robertsons, they are laughing with them.So what is the lesson here?Understand what you are buying.I bought this program thinking that we
were getting one thing and in reality I was buying something else
entirely; I should have realized that before we were up to our hips in
dead ducks.The Robertsons are a
tight-knit evangelical Christian family that believes in all the things
such a family usually believes in, including those things that aren’t going
to make them hugely popular in New York City
and California.So in the future this network will not
be airing any more programming featuring tight-knit evangelical
families.Unlike a conventional
television cast of actors, most of whom would gut their own mothers with a
dull fish knife in order to advance their careers, a tightly knit family
will always present a united front to an outsider threatening the group
interest and will use the Bible to justify their pigheaded refusal to see
reason. In addition to this, the Robertsons are an American success story whose collective worth, I’ve read in reliable financial sources, is
approximately $83 million.Let me
repeat that for those of you not paying attention: $83 million. Yes, there
is a lot of money in killing water fowl, no two ways about it, a lot of
money, the kind of money that buys the person with that kind of money a
lot of immunity from the kinds of pressure the network usually brings to
bear on a recalcitrant star in order to get them to conform to our view of
the common good. Therefore, in the future the network will not be
featuring any programming featuring tightly knit evangelical Christian
families with the financial wherewithal to tell the network where to go
stick it.We will concentrate on
programming featuring poor people, preferably very poor people who will do
anything to stay on television and keep the money coming in.We need to control the talent, everyone;
otherwise, all you get is this sort of anarchy.

Yes, this whole thing makes us look incredibly
bad, there’s no getting around that, so when the media asks us for a
comment, we’re just going to say nothing in as many words as possible and
tell everyone that this situation was unfortunate. Unfortunate is this
network’s mantra until this tempest in a teapot blows over.If the gay rights people criticize us
for our stand, that’s unfortunate as well, but tell them publicly that we
sympathize. Privately, we say that all Phil wants is for America’s gays to repent and
amend their lives; remember, if they were ducks, he’d be trying to blow their heads
off with a shotgun, so tell them to count their damn blessings.

The rest of
the memo dealt with matters that did not concern the Robertson affair, so we
had redacted them in the interests of brevity. We have made several calls to A
& E to ask for their comments on the memo; they have not returned our
calls, except for a short statement saying that the memo is not an accurate
reflection of the views of A & E’s senior management. Since then, all I've heard from them is the sound of crickets chirping happily away. That may mean something or maybe it doesn't. I only report; you get to decide what it all means.